Sony VGC-V2S

PCs aren't just multitasking; they're doing everything except the housework

Modern life can be pretty confusing. Pubs used to be places where the food was more Little Chef than celebrity chef. Cereal used to be something that came in bowls, not wrappers. And TVs were TVs and PCs were PCs. Today, we've got strange "gastropubs", Kellogg's bars alongside the Dairy Milk and Sony VAIOs that are also flat tellies.

Fortunately, that last development is actually quite good. This particular Sony offering gives you a 20-inch widescreen TV with a great picture, plus a powerful PC that can record over 200 hours of telly onto a 250GB hard disk.

The hardware side of things is extremely impressive. Not only does the screen look great, but it also spins 360 degrees on its pedestal and has surprisingly good built-in speakers that are up to the quality of a micro hi-fi. Even the wireless keyboard, mouse and remote control are well built, though the keyboard doesn't have much spring if you're planning on doing serious amounts of typing.

Like Sony's previous PC-TVs, this VAIO is designed to offer access to TV, music, videos and photos via its remote control - on top of functioning as a normal PC. Unlike its predecessors, it's finally got a good Windows Media Centre-esque interface for doing so. Menus are visible from roughly two metres away from the screen, and navigating between slide shows of your holiday snaps and recording a show off the telly is fairly easy. The interface supports whichever file formats you install support for on the PC.

The whole TV/media aspect is assisted by a quick-ish standby mode that we found generally took three seconds to power down, and eight to come back on. There's also a useful online electronic programme guide that enables you to set recordings via a Web browser while you're out and about - so long as the V2S is online at home.

As a conventional PC, we really like this Sony. It's quick, it's powerful enough to run Doom 3 and other new games, and it comes complete with stacks of software. It's even got one of the first DVD burners that records onto dual-layer discs, offering almost double the capacity of single-layer blanks.

So, is it all a bed of roses? Not quite. You only get channels one to five for TV and you can only watch the channel you're recording (where what we'd really like to see are two tuners, and Freeview ones at that). There's also a mildly annoying "wake-up" lag for the wireless keyboard and mouse.

This lack of telly talent stops us from giving Sony full marks, but there's still little confusion in our minds - this is one damn fine PC-TV.

FEATURES
3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor. 512MB RAM. 250GB hard drive. Dual-layer DVD+R/+RW DVD drive. NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 graphics card.